"Cordwainer Smith - Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

"Was it important?"
"Mamselle, let us not talk about it."
"We must," she cried. "It's life or death." Her hands were clenched so tightly together that her knuckles showed white. Her beer stood in front of her, untouched, growing warm in the sunlight.
"Very well," said Macht, "you may ask ... I cannot guarantee to answer."
I controlled myself no longer. 'What's all this about?"
Virginia looked at me with scorn, but even her scorn was the scorn
oг a lover, not the cold remoteness of the past. "Please, Paul, you wouldn't know. Wait a while. What did it say to you, M'sieu Macht?" "That I, Maximilien Macht, would live or die with a brown-haired girl who was already betrothed." He smiled wrily, "And I do not even quite know what "betrothed' means."
"We'll find out," said Virginia. "When did it say this?" "Who is It'?" I shouted at them. "For God's sake, what is this all about?"
Macht looked at me and dropped his voice when he spoke: "The Abba-dingo." To her he said, "Last week."
Virginia turned white. "So it does work, it does, it does. Paul darling, it said nothing to me. But it said to my aunt something which I can't ever forgetl"
I held her arm firmly and tenderly and tried to look into her eyes, but she looked away. Said I, "What did it say?" "Paul and Virginia." "So what?" said I.
I scarcely knew her. Her lips were tense and compressed. She was not angry. It was something different, worse. She was in the grip of tension. I suppose we had not seen that for thousands of years, either. "Paul, seize this simple fact, if you can grasp it. The machine gave that woman our names-but it gave them to her twelve years ago."
Macht stood up so suddenly that his chair fell over, and the waiter began running toward us.
"That settles it," he said. 'We're all going back." "Going where?" I said. 'To the Abba-dingo."
"But why now?" said I; and, 'Will it work?" said Virginia, both at the same time.
"It always works," said Macht, "if you go on the northern side." "How do you get there?" said Virginia.
Macht frowned sadly, "There's only one way. By Alpha Ralpha Boulevard." Virginia stood up. And so did I.
Then, as I rose, I remembered. Alpha Ralpha Boulevard. It was a ruined street hanging in the sky, faint as a vapor trail. It had been a processional highway once, where conquerors came down and tribute went up. But it was ruined, lost in the clouds, closed to mankind for a hundred centuries.
"I know it," said I. "It's ruined."
Macht said nothing, but he stared at me as if I were an outsider . . .
Virginia, very quiet and white of countenance, said, "Come along."
"But why?" said I. 'Why?"
"You fool," she said, "if we don't have a God, at least we have a machine. This is the only thing left on or off the world which the Instrumentality doesn't understand. Maybe it tells the future. Maybe it's an un-machine. It certainly comes from a different time. Can't you use it; darling? If it says we're us, we're us."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then we're not." Her face was sullen with grief.
'What do you mean?"
"If we're not us," she said, "we're just toys, dolls, puppets that the lords have written on. You're not you and I'm not me. But if the Abba-dingo, which knew the names Paul and Virginia twelve years before it happened-if the Abba-dingo says that we are us, I don't care if it's a predicting machine or a god or a devil or a what. I don't care, but I'll have the truth."
What could I have answered to that? Macht led, she followed, and I walked third in single file. We left the sunlight of The Greasy Cat; just as we left, a light rain began to fall. The waiter, looking momentarily like the machine that he was, stared straight ahead. We crossed the lip of the underground and went down to the fast expressway.
When we came out, we were in a region of fine homes. All were in ruins. The trees had thrust their way into the buildings. Flowers rioted across the lawn, through the open doors, and blazed in the roofless rooms. Who needed a house in the open, when the population of Earth had dropped so that the cities were commodious and empty?
Once I thought I saw a family of homunculi, including little ones, peering at me as we trudged along the soft gravel road. Maybe the faces I had seen at the edge of the house were fantasies.
Macht said nothing.
Virginia and I held hands as we walked beside him. I could have been happy at this odd excursion, but her hand was tightly clenched in mine. She bit her lower lip from time to time. I knew it mattered to her -she was on a pilgrimage. (A pilgrimage was an ancient walk to some powerful place, very good for body and soul.) I didn't mind going along. In fact, they could not have kept me from coming, once she and Macht decided to leave the cafe. But I didn't have to take it seriously. Did I?
What did Macht want?
Who was Macht? What thoughts had that mind learned in two short weeks? How had he preceded us into a new world of danger and adventure? I did not trust him. For the first time in my life I felt alone. Always, always, up to now, I had only to think ahout the Instrumentality and some protector leaped fully armed into my mind. Telepathy guarded against all dangers, healed all hurts, carried each of us forward to the one hundred and forty-six thousand and ninety-seven days which had been allotted us. Now it was different. I did not know this man, and it was on him that I relied, not on the powers which had shielded and protected us.
We turned from the ruined road into an immense boulevard. The pavement was so smooth and unbroken that nothing grew on it, save where the wind and dust had deposited random little pockets of earth.
Macht stopped.
"This is it," he said. "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard."
We fell silent and looked at the causeway of forgotten empires.
To our left the boulevard disappeared in a gentle curve. It led far north of the city in which I had been reared. I knew that there was another city to the north, but I had forgotten its name. Why should I have remembered it? It was sure to be just like my own.
But to the right-To the right the boulevard rose sharply, like a ramp. It disappeared into the clouds. Just at the edge of the cloud-line there was a hint of disaster. I could not see for sure, but it looked to me as though the whole boulevard had been sheared off by unimaginable forces. Somewhere beyond the clouds there stood the Abba-dingo, the place where all questions were answered . . .
Or so they thought.
Virginia cuddled close to me.
"Let's turn back," said I. "We are city people. We don't know anything about ruins."
"You can if you want to," said Macht. "I was just trying to do you a favor."
We both looked at Virginia.
She looked up at me with those brown eyes. From the eyes there came a plea older than woman or man, older than the human race. I knew what she was going to say before she said it. She was going to say that she had to know.
Macht was idly crushing some soft rocks near his foot.
At last Virginia spoke up: "Paul, I don't want danger for its own sake. But I meant what I said back there. Isn't there a chance that we were told to love each other? What sort of a life would it be if our happiness, our own selves, depended on a thread in a machine or on a mechanical voice which spoke to us when we were asleep and learning French? It may be fun to go back to the old world. I guess it is. I know that you give me a kind of happiness which I never even suspected before this day. If it's really us, we have something wonderful, and we ought to know it. But if it isn't-" She burst into sobs.
I wanted to say, "If it isn't, it will seem just the same," but the ominous sulky face of Macht looked at me over Virginia's shoulder as I drew her to me. There was nothing to say.
I held her close.